Notre Dame Football: Brandon Wimbush should get the Week 1 nod

Week 1 of the 2018 college footabll season has a ton of exciting matchups on tap. Notre Dame football faces Michigan in one of the best.

Notre Dame football has one of the tougher matchups of all projected top 25 programs entering the 2018, to kick things off. Head coach Jim Harbaugh and his Michigan Wolverines travel to South Bend, IN, to face the Fighting Irish in Week 1 of the 2018 season. Before that happens, Notre Dame has a lot to figure out on the offensive side of the ball. The main thing for head coach Brian Kelly and the Irish to solve before the start of the regular season is the quarterback situation.

Kelly has a very interesting quarterback battle going on in South Bend, between three talented signal callers. Rising senior dual threat quarterback Brandon Wimbush got most of the playing time last year, but finished with a sub par completion percentage (at best).

His backup for most of the year, Ian Book, is a better pocket passer than Wimbush. And, incoming freshman four-star recruit Phil Jurkovec is young and could have the brightest future of them all. However, the inexperience from Jurkovec likely puts him behind the eight ball in this quarterback competition.

Notre Dame has another extremely tough slate in 2018, and things ramp up from the very beginning. Things need to be figured out by the time fall camp comes around.

Moreover, most of the attention for Notre Dame’s spring game will fall on the separation between Book and Wimbush. It’s hard to get much out of Kelly at this moment to find out who’s ahead in his mind.

Since Michigan will be coming into town with a potential star quarterback in Shea Patterson, that makes Kelly’s decision that much more significant. Wimbush can take advantage of knowing the big stage from some huge matchups he started last year.

Next: The case for each Notre Dame quarterback to start in 2018

The safe move, and the wise one, is to go with the experience factor and Wimbush in this situation. It’s hard to tell which Wimbush would show up here, but that uncertainty could play in favor of the Irish. Michigan wouldn’t really know the best way to prepare for him.